I missed the Resurrection. Damn! I was born too late. Wrong time. Wrong place.
But I heard about it.
Boy, did I ever.
Preacher after preacher said it was the greatest thing ever in the history of the world! Maybe so. But sunrise is pretty great, too.
Amazing, in fact.
Just when you think the sun is dead and gone, it rises again.
Eureka!
Light out of darkness. Life out of death. If it only happened now and again, we’d be blown away.
WOW. WOW. WOW.
But it happens everyday.
Ho hum. Another sunrise.
So it just might take a different sort of miracle to awaken us to wonder again.
Yes, I’m sorry I missed the Resurrection. But I’m glad I heard about it, even though it’s not the same as being there, don’t you know. (Think: Woodstock.)
For a long while, I was hung up on the physics of the Resurrection. The impossibility of it all. The science. After all, I believe in natural law. Dead bodies don’t come back to life. That’s indisputable.
Jesus died. Period. End of story.
Or so I thought.
And then I thought again. Behold! There are two sides to the brain: left and right.
Rational and mystical. Literal and symbolic. Prose and poetry.
I came to see the Resurrection and Creation as poetry—primordial and mythical, neither one a single point in time, occurring only once in one place, but rather continuously, wondrously, magically. Miracles and grace abounding. Within us and without us. Endlessly.
Behold! The wonder of it all!
Of course, that’s not how the gospel writers depict it. They portray it as a bodily—flesh, bone, and blood—reappearance of Jesus three days after his death.
That’s not how I see it.
I’ve seen “Jesus” resurrected in a thousand different places, in a thousand different guises, with a thousand different names, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, comforting the distressed, befriending the lonely, welcoming the outcast, standing up against tyranny, and refusing the sword.
That’s love.
And it never dies.
Whenever anyone kneels before a crying child, offers bread to the hungry, an ear to the distraught or a shoulder to the bereaved, researches a cure to a disease, rebuilds devastated houses, adopts an orphan, visits the imprisoned, stands up to tyranny, makes a sad person laugh—that’s the Resurrection in practice.
Resurrection is always in motion.
Like a mystical dance.
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